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first French Revolution, is now fixed firmly for a long future period, is the Week—a notion specifically connected with the Moon. Yet it has long been made evident that even this division of the month into four weeks was in antiquity sometimes exchanged for a solar division into three decads. This was due to the influence of the agricultural stage of civilisation giving prominence to the Sun. We know this, e.g., of the Egyptians, and it was therefore long doubted whether they knew the division into weeks at all. But Sir Gardner Wilkinson collected a series of proofs that among the Egyptians the later system of decads was historically preceded by the division of the months into four weeks of seven days each.^[1] It is also tolerably certain of the Mexicans, that of their two methods of reckoning time, which in later times were in force side by side, the Tonulpohualli or 'solar reckoning' and the Metzlapohualli or 'lunar reckoning,' the latter was historically the earlier, but was retained in the time of the solar chronology, as is so frequently the case in computations of time.^[2] We ought, moreover, also to consider the computation of longer periods of time by Masika, i.e. rainy seasons, which prevails among the Unyamwesi in Africa.^[3] How powerful is the posthumous influence even on later times of the nomadic lunar division into weeks, an influence which again and again obtained validity, even after it had been once supplanted by the solar reckoning by decads, we see best among the Romans. They had originally a consistent lunar computation; even their year consisted of ten months, the sun's cycle of twelve months being ignored; and they divided the month into four weeks.^[4] Later, this fourfold division gave way to a threefold division into three decads, nonae, kalendae, idus; but yet

1. In Rawlinson's History of Herodotus, App. to Book II. chap. VII. §16–20 (ed. of 1862, vol. II. p. 282 et seq.).
2. Waitz, l.c. IV. 174.
3. See Karl Andree, Forschungsreisen, &c., II. 205.
4. Mommsen, History of Rome, I. 217 (ed. 1862), 230 (ed. 1868).